Stunning music and photography at the symphony

Orchestra managers throughout North American are fretting about what to do with an overwhelmingly aural idiom in an overwhelmingly visual age.

The Houston Symphony came up with a spectacular, albeit one-time solution this weekend with a multimedia presentation of Richard Strauss’ monumental An Alpine Symphony.

Saturday in Jones Hall, music director Hans Graf and an ensemble of 120 players poured out Strauss’ musical depiction of a day hiking in the Alps while a photomontage by German Tobias Melle swept by on a huge screen hung behind the players.

Melle’s photography, seen in its North American debut, was no mere travelogue. He carefully depicted what was going on during the nearly two dozen vignettes in Strauss’ program for the work: If there were cow bells in the orchestra, there were cows on screen, complete with ID tags in their ears.

Beyond that Melle rigorously aligned his photography to the details of the score. He frequently changed pictures precisely when Strauss punctuated the music with dramatic peaks or changes of mood. Melle must have taken a zillion pictures in the area around Berchtesgaden to get just the right images. The result was a conceptually and visually stunning accompaniment to Strauss’ music – all the more impressive because of the roughly 50-minute length of the piece.

Graf and the orchestra added to the effect by starting in almost total darkness. Only a dim light on Graf allowed the musicians to begin the work from memory. After a few moments, the lights on the music stands began to brighten so the players could continue. The performance ended in a similar, reverse way.

The danger in such a presentation is that the performance gets too little attention from viewers – and the interpretation by Graf and the orchestra certainly warranted total attention. Polished, pungent, but never overdone, the playing was a glorious account of Strauss’ sprawling final tone poem. Many times, I simply shielded my eyes, or at least averted them, to concentrate on the music-making.

An Alpine Symphony was the hefty illustration of the subtle theme of Graf’s program: bookends of Romanticism.

He opened with Beethoven’s Overture to Fidelio. In his evolution as a composer, Beethoven forcefully laid out some of major musical ideas that the 19th century developed. In the Fidelio overture, Graf stressed the heightened drama found in a lot of the century’s orchestra music through sharp, exciting contrastsof loud, aggressive music with quiet passages almost lost in time.

Strauss was the last great output of German romanticism, while Sir Edward Elgar, represented by his Cello Concerto, was an English parallel, dragging elements of musical Victorianism into the 20th century,

Houston Symphony principal cellist Brinton Smith was the soloist. He and Graf shared musical values about the piece; the account was ultimately cool in expression and execution. Smith played with admirable precision and insight, which Graf deftly echoed in the accompaniment.

But the music also contains glimpses of the passions that surged underneath the surface of Victorianism in general and the era’s music in particular. A peek into that realm would have been added electricity to the performance.